The body, the object, and the city. Visual encounters and the drama of an ethnography of sport

Abstract

This article explores the multisensory role of visual culture in articulating the embodied and material dimensions of an informal sport within a youth community in Tijuana, Mexico. Drawing on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, it examines how young sportsmen use visual production to represent and share the material entanglements of their practice, made of a dynamic synthesis of bodies, material culture, and urban spaces. By analysing the failed “implication” in a collaborative visual project with a local interlocutor, I reflect on the methodological challenges of “observant participation” in sport ethnography, where bodily “implication” through a domestication of local material culture is essential yet inherently limited for the researcher. The discrepancy between visual languages for self-representation and textual languages for etic description explains both the failure of collaboration in the local visual project and the possibility of deriving ethnographic knowledge from it. The study argues that the distinction between narrative languages and forms is ultimately rooted in varying degrees of incorporation between bodies in motion and specific regimes of materiality, considering the latter as typical traits in the subjectification of the young sportsmen in Tijuana.